Neglected Daytona Beach, Florida Cemeteries Getting Help

For many years now, ghost tours of Daytona Beach, Florida, have been helping to fund restoration of 11 neglected local cemeteries.

11 Cemeteries Being Helped

One of the better-known cemeteries is the 6-acre Mount Arrarat Cemtery on Bellvue Avenue near Daytona Beach International Airport, the oldest black cemetery in the city, established in 1899.

The cemetery had been neglected, it was overgrown, litter-filled, dilapidated, and vandalized. Human remains had actually been found protruding from the earth. Excavated remains were found near their graves. Even today, vandalism remains a problem due to lack of security.

Dusty Smith, author, ghost tour guide, and is founder of the International Association of Cemetery Preservationists, Inc., said that the vandals have broken and stolen headstones as well as broken into the vaults. Graves have been robbed and body parts have even been stolen.

"These are the people that built this city," said Smith, "and now no one seems to care what happens to them. They obviously can't complain for themselves, so we are tryng to give them a voice in the community."

Fund-Raising

Smith's group has been working with meager funding creatively raised to restore the Mt Arrarat and 10 other cemeteries, including Gethsemane, Saints and Sinners, and Payola. After more than a decade of effort, they've managed to complete restoration of one cemetery.

One fund-raising project brings in money though a $10 a year headstone adoption at Gethsemane Cemetery with the money used on that specific cemetery project.

A portion of each ticket Smith sells for the tours by The Haunts of the World's Most Famous Beach Ghost Tours goes to fund restoration efforts. Smith is author of "Haunted Daytona Beach: A Ghostly Tour of the the World's Most famous Beach" " and "Dread and the Dead Filled the Dunham House", which was the basis of an episode of Discovery Channel's series, "A Haunting."

Smith and the other members of The Daytona Beach Paranormal Research Group, Inc., as well as members of the cemetery preservation group who are not associated with the DBPRG, Inc., donate at least one afternoon each month to cemetery preservation and restoration efforts.

Mt Arrarat Complications

Arrarat Cemetery was opened more than 100 years ago as a not-for-profit by 12 stockholders and that ownership has filtered down through the decades to relatives of the original stockholders.

The problem is that only a couple of those descendants remain, according to Smith. Family members of the deceased have generally been charged with keeping up the cemetery. No doubt many of the families have long forgotten their obligations and probably even the relative buried there so many decades ago. About 600 people are interred in the cemetery, including veterans of American wars dating back to the Civil War.

As a not-for-profit cemetery which does not sell burial plots, it is exempt from state regulation which covers for-profit cemeteries. It is unlicensed, unlicensed, and largely unremembered.

But the International Association of Cemetery Preservationists, Inc., remember. On it's website(http://www.iacpinc.org/index.html) is a quote from Benjamin Franklin: "One can tell the morals of a culture by the way they treat their dead."